Chapter 1 · Ethical Principles and Responsibilities · about 9 min · 1,868 words
1/6 · Why this matters in practice
A supervisor hands you a case on a Thursday afternoon. The client is nineteen, has lost a lot of weight, and is not eating. You have eight years of solid outpatient experience and no training at all in eating disorders. The specialist programme across town has a four-month waitlist. Your agency has nobody else.
Nothing there is a rule violation yet, and every option can be argued for. What decides it is not a rule you can look up but a value — that you practise within what you are actually competent to do, and that the obligation is owed to the client, not to your own sense of being helpful.
Values look like the soft part of the syllabus. They are not. They decide cases where no specific rule applies, and they are what the exam reaches for when a vignette offers four defensible-looking options. Competence, social justice, integrity, and dignity and worth are not sentiments. Each has enforceable standards hanging off it.
Three levels, and the exam moves between them. A value is something the profession holds important. A principle is the broad aspiration following from it. A standard is a specific, often enforceable rule. The NASW Code of Ethics is built in that order: six core values, each paired with a principle, then numbered standards beneath. You are disciplined against standards — but standards are read in light of the principles, and where no standard fits, the values are what you reason from.
The six core values and the principle attached to each:
These are not ranked, and they collide constantly. Service pulls against competence when your agency needs a case covered. Social justice pulls against a client's stated wishes. The Code sets no hierarchy among its values and says so in its Purpose section. Working through those collisions is its own lesson; this one gives you a clear view of what is actually in conflict.
Competence has a hard, testable edge. Standard 1.04(a) limits you to services within your education, training, licence, certification, consultation received, supervised experience, or other relevant professional experience. Subsection (b) is the one items are built on: to work in an area or use a technique new to you, you need appropriate study, training, consultation, and supervision from people competent in it — all of it, not self-directed reading alone. Where recognised standards do not exist, (c) requires careful judgement and responsible steps to protect clients from harm. Subsections (d) and (e) extend competence to technology, including the laws of your jurisdiction and, when applicable, the client's. Standard 4.01 adds that you accept responsibility only on existing competence or an intention to acquire it, and that practice rests on recognised, empirically based knowledge. The activities that keep competence current are their own lesson.
Cultural competence is part of competence, and the 2021 revision sharpened it. Standard 1.05 now asks for more than awareness: understanding culture's function and the strengths within all cultures; skill enough to deliver culturally informed services that empower marginalised people; action against oppression; critical self-reflection, including acknowledging your own privilege; treating clients as the experts on their own culture; and holding institutions accountable. Subsection (e) extends this to electronic services and gaps in technology access. The NASW cultural competence standards (2015) and the practice literature (Sue et al. 2016) develop the same ground.
Social justice is an obligation, not a preference. Standard 6.04 directs social workers toward social and political action to expand access and opportunity, promote conditions that respect diversity, and prevent and eliminate discrimination. Policy analysis treats this as how burdens and benefits are distributed across a society, not as individual charity (Barusch 2018).
Integrity is behavioural, not attitudinal. Standard 4.04 prohibits dishonesty, fraud, and deception, and applies to your conduct generally, not only with clients.
Your personal values are not the professional ones. Holding a private conviction is not a problem; letting it govern the work is. Standard 4.02 forbids practising, condoning, facilitating, or collaborating with discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, colour, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, political belief, religion, immigration status, or mental or physical ability. Discomfort with who a client is, or with a lawful choice they have made, is not a competence gap and not a ground for refusing them.
A note on jurisdiction. These six values are NASW's. Canadian jurisdictions are governed by the CASW Code of Ethics (2024), which sets out seven core values, including truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Same structure, different list.
Return to the case from the opening. The nineteen-year-old is referred to your community mental health centre with restrictive eating, recent weight loss, and low mood. You have eight years of general outpatient experience and no training in eating disorders. The specialist programme has a four-month waitlist, and nobody else at your agency has the expertise. What is the BEST course of action?
A. Accept the case and keep up with the current treatment literature between sessions. B. Decline the case and give the client the specialist programme's contact details. C. Accept the case with regular supervision from a clinician experienced in eating disorders, tell the client about that arrangement, and put her on the specialist waitlist in parallel. D. Offer supportive counselling only, avoiding any eating-disorder-specific work, until the specialist programme has capacity.
Three of these are things careful practitioners do. Reading up (A) is what most of us do when a case stretches us. Referring on (B) is what the competence value seems to demand on a quick reading. Limiting the work (D) sounds like the humble choice.
BEST resolves to C, and 1.04(b) is why. The Code does not say stay away from what you have not done; it says enter a new area through study, training, consultation, and supervision from someone competent in it. C is the only option that obtains the competence rather than working around its absence.
A fails because self-directed reading is one part of a four-part requirement, and the missing parts are the ones that would catch your errors. B treats referral as disposal: a phone number and a four-month wait leaves a client with a medically consequential condition unserved, and referral means connecting people to care, not ending contact. D is the subtlest error. Restricting yourself to generic support for four months does not make you competent, and it leaves a problem carrying real medical risk untouched. Doing less is not the same as doing it safely.
Change the facts and the answer changes. Had the vignette described fainting or acute medical instability, the first move would be medical assessment — part of competence is recognising what falls outside any counselling scope.
Items rarely ask you to name the six values. They put two of them in tension and see which one you protect.
The most common pairing is competence against service: an agency needs the case covered, and the tempting option helps right now. The Code's answer is that willingness is not competence, and the route into unfamiliar work runs through supervision and consultation, not good intentions.
Expect dignity and worth against your own judgement — a client making a choice you would not make. And expect integrity to appear as a small, deniable dishonesty: a diagnosis adjusted to secure coverage, a note backdated to look contemporaneous, a credential slightly overstated.
Where cultural competence is tested, the newer language matters: an option resting on self-reflection, on the client as authority on their own culture, or on naming an institutional barrier usually beats one resting on the worker's general knowledge about a group.
Treating values as decoration. Candidates skim the values section because it reads like a mission statement, then meet a vignette where no numbered standard applies. Every value here has enforceable standards under it, and items are built on those.
Confusing willingness with competence. Caring about a client, having capacity in your diary, and being the only one available are not qualifications. This is the single most reliable trap in the topic.
Reading competence as a reason to refuse. The opposite error, just as common. The Code treats unfamiliar work as something to enter properly, not avoid, and an option declining a client without connecting them to care is abandonment wearing humility.
Letting personal conviction pass as professional judgement. Believing a client should leave a relationship, take medication, or reconcile with family is not the same as that being the professional course. Ask which value the option serves — and whose.
Sources used
The 24 practice questions for this lesson, and the progress tracking that comes with them, need a free account. The reading never does.